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Water: The Only Jewel in the Summit's Crown |
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By Marwaan Macan-Markar*
One of the few achievements of the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development, the promise to halve the population without water and sanitation by 2015, could slip between the fingers of the poor due to privatization efforts, warn activists.
JOHANNESBURG - It had quickly become an open secret: the only consensus possible at the first mega-conference of the millennium, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), would be on the issue of water.
At the Summit, also known as Rio+10, 190 governments pledged to reduce by half the number of people without access to safe and affordable water and adequate sanitation by 2015. The meeting's other water-related achievement was to establish a network to protect the planet's fast-depleting marine life.
But left behind at the 10-day event, which ended Sep 4, were a year's worth of preparatory debates to obtain concrete commitments on the Summit's four other main themes: energy, health, biodiversity and agriculture.
So it is understandable that while the United Nations officials were quick to highlight the water agreements, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activists from around the globe shouted: "Betrayal!" "Failure!"
Nitin Desai, the WSSD secretary-general, said, ''This is a historic moment.'' For the first time, the world ''has made the issues of water and sanitation a high-level political priority.''
''We need this political commitment, and now we need the practical measures and partnerships to ensure that the new goals are met,'' he added.
And water is no minor problem: approximately 1.1 billion people lack sufficient supplies of clean and safe water, while four billion people -- two-thirds of the global population -- do not have adequate sanitation facilities, according to United Nations figures.
The poor children of the planet have suffered the most as a result. More than seven million minors die every year -- or some 6,000 a day -- due to tainted water-related diseases that include cholera and dysentery, says the UN. In Latin America and the Caribbean, just 13 percent of wastewater is treated.
''The world's current investment of 15 billion dollars per year in water development must be doubled in order to halve the number of the people lacking water services,'' Jamal Saghir, director of the World Bank's energy and water division, told the Summit.
In this sense, there was some good news by the end of the WSSD. The United States announced that it would invest 970 million dollars over the next three years in water and sanitation projects, while the European Union guaranteed funds for water and sanitation initiatives in Africa and Central Asia through its ''Water for Life'' program.
While NGOs and environmentalists welcome these first waves of support for water and sanitation, they express caution about possible dangers that lurk ahead, particularly the greater private sector role in supplying water in developing countries.
''There is a danger that water is being increasingly treated as a commodity, making it fit into the agenda of the World Trade Organization,'' Shiney Varghese, senior program associate at the U.S.-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told Tierramérica.
''The multinational water companies are primarily interested in capturing a specific market: that of urban growth centers, particularly in developing countries.''
''Large sections of civil society are opposed to the current paradigm propagated by the international water establishment,'' she added. ''This paradigm, through its promotion of multinational-led privatization and supply-oriented water management strategies, will further worsen the condition of water-poor peoples and of the ecosystems.''
The Sierra Club, a powerful U.S.-based environmental group, also supports that view, saying that the international community must establish potable water as a right "linked directly with environmental justice and real sustainable development, grounded in poverty eradication and environmental protection.''
Going forward from Johannesburg, the debate on water and other common goods will be channeled through what are known as "Type 2" partnerships, which involve the consumer community, NGOs, governments and the private sector.
These partnerships are seen by the United Nations and some developed countries as the best way to fund sustainable development programs in addition to the ''Type 1'' efforts, which are carried out in the developing world but financed by wealthy countries.
By the end of the Summit, close to 20 million dollars had been pledged for water and sanitation projects under the ''Type 2'' arrangement.
At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the governments of the industrialized nations pledged to give 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) annually for international development aid. But to date, only four -- Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway -- have met this pledge.
"Type 2" projects already exist in several countries. For example, London-based Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation (or BPD) has spearheaded such partnerships in Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal and South Africa.
Ravi Narayanan, director of Water Aid, a British development agency that is part of the BPD initiative, explained to Tierramérica that these efforts are not about privatization or giving multinational corporations easy access to supply water and sanitation for urban communities.
Rather, it is a way of supplying water to the poor "through tri-sector partnerships, with communities and NGOs having a role to shape and influence the private sector's involvement in supplying water and sanitation,'' said Narayanan.
In the opinions of many activists and officials, these "Type 2" partnerships are the real fruit of the Johannesburg meet.
"This Summit will be remembered not for the treaties, the commitments, or the declarations it produced, but for the first stirrings of a new way of governing the global commons," said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
Whether this is much, or little, only time will tell.
* Marwaan Macan-Markar is an IPS correspondent.
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